Modern data systems contain vast amounts of data. Such data systems may include, for example, email servers, commercial websites, banking records, government databases, etc.
Increasingly, there is an expectation that these data systems must always be accessible to the user. For example, if a commercial website is not accessible to the user, (e.g. Amazon.com went down), the business may lose millions of dollars of revenue for every day the website is inaccessible.
With an ever increasing amount of data, and an ever increasing expectation that the data be accessible, there is tremendous pressure to protect data systems. Conventional data protection schemes are used to restore data systems in case of disasters. However, these conventional data protection schemes are either too slow in recovering the data, or too expensive. Further, conventional data protection schemes require completely recovering the data before allowing access to the data.
Unfortunately, there may be times when data in a data system needs to be accessible before the recovery operation is complete.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method, article of manufacture, and apparatus for protecting and accessing data in data systems.